Chart Digging: June 17, 1967

Looking at the Billboard Top Ten from June 17, 1967 – forty-four years ago today – provides me with a sliver of a memory tied to music and a St. Cloud department store.

But first, that Top Ten:

“Groovin’” by the Young Rascals
“Respect” by Aretha Franklin
“She’d Rather Be With Me” by the Turtles
“Release Me (And Let Me Love Again)” by Engelbert Humperdinck
“Somebody To Love” by the Jefferson Airplane
“Little Bit O’ Soul” by the Music Explosion
“Windy” by the Association
“All I Need” by the Temptations
“I Got Rhythm” by the Happenings
“Mirage” by Tommy James & The Shondells

I’d listen to that radio show. Well, I might go get a sandwich when the Happenings’ tune started coming out of the speakers. I’ve never much cared for their take on the Gershwins’ classic song. The Tommy James tune isn’t as familiar as are others, but during a little bit of listening this morning, it sounded fine. And I imagine some folks might dis the Engelbert Humperdinck record. It’s true that it doesn’t fit in with the rest, but I remember liking it and hearing it more frequently than the others tunes in that list, which likely means it was getting airplay on stations that offered a more middle-of-the-road format.

I also recall “Windy,” and that’s not so much from hearing it on the radio as from a summertime bike ride: Rick and I headed across the Mississippi and into downtown one morning during the summer of 1967, most likely in June. We rode to what essentially was the west end of the shopping district and began to lock our bikes to the bike rack.

And as we did, he asked me, “So, what songs do you like these days?”

I remember hesitating. Not being very plugged into radio, there weren’t a lot of songs I knew, much less knew well enough to like. As I’ve written before, I certainly heard Top 40 radio all around me, but that didn’t mean I was paying much attention. But I could at least throw a title around. “Well, ‘Windy’ is nice,” I said. “I like that one.”

“You liked ‘Georgy Girl,’ didn’t you?” I nodded. I had liked the Seekers’ record when it was getting airplay (and going to No. 2) earlier that year. He said something about my liking songs with girls’ names in the titles, and we walked into the new Tempo department store.

I’m not sure what was there before, maybe a collection of buildings with small businesses. But sometime in the mid-1960s, everything on the block was demolished. And soon enough, construction began on a building that covered half the block. Three quarters or so of the new building was taken up by Tempo, which could be described as a little bit Sears and a little bit Kmart. The other portion of the building was devoted to a Red Owl grocery store.

I’ve always wondered at the combination of Tempo and Red Owl. I’d seen Red Owl stores before. Red Owl was one of two ubiquitous grocery chains in the area in those days. You could head into Lanesboro, into Thief River Falls, into Pipestone, into just about any small to medium-sized city in Minnesota, and there was either a Red Owl or a Super Valu. Maybe both, if the town was big enough or was a regional hub, as St. Cloud was.

And I wondered right from the time Tempo opened back in the mid-1960s why a Red Owl was sharing space with Tempo, a store I’d never heard about. I never knew why until this morning, when I was poking around Wikipedia and learned that both store chains – Red Owl and Tempo – were owned by Gamble-Skogmo, a “conglomerate of retail chains and other businesses” that at one time was the fifteenth largest retailer in the United States. I’d forgotten about Gambles, which had a store in downtown St. Cloud when I was a kid. (St. Cloud was, in fact, the location of the first Gamble Auto Supply store in 1925, according to Wikipedia.) I don’t suppose Rick or I ever spent any time in Gambles. I don’t recall doing so, and this morning, neither my mom nor I could remember where in downtown the store was located.

But Rick and I headed on into Tempo that June day in 1967, probably just to check out the new store and see if there was anything fun for kids there. We ignored the Red Owl grocery store inside, and we found little to interest us in the Tempo portion of the store.

The building is gone now, as is Gamble-Skogmo, the parent company of Tempo and Red Owl and a good number of other retail chains. (The bare bones story at Wikipedia reads like the story of thousands of companies, with its arc of founding, development, over-reaching and eventual dissolution.) There are, Wikipedia says, two Red Owl grocery stores in existence today, one in LeRoy, Minnesota, and the other in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

A bank building occupies the block now, and though I stop by there regularly, nothing about the bank ever makes me think of “Windy” or “Georgy Girl.”

In The Lower Levels Of The Chart
I’d planned to possibly include “Windy” as one of the featured records in this post, and that would have been okay. But after glancing at the Top Ten, I followed my normal pattern and moved to the bottom of the chart, to see what intriguing things might lie there. And there were riches waiting. In the Bubbling Under section of that chart from June 17, 1967, I found six records that seemed worth of a listen, far more than usual. So I’ll pass on “Windy” in favor of the fun stuff that’s fascinatingly obscure.

The New Vaudeville Band – made up of studio musicians hired by songwriter Geoff Stephens – topped the chart for three weeks in late 1966 with the faux-1920s anthem “Winchester Cathedral.” When the record hit, Stephens put together a group to go on tour, with singer Alan Klein being billed – says Wikipedia – as “Tristam, Seventh Earl of Cricklewood.” Credited thus to “The New Vaudeville Band Featuring Tristam VII,” the single “Finchley Central” was sitting at No. 102. Another faux-1920s/music hall style piece, the record doesn’t quite have the charm of the earlier hit, and it went no higher.

A tale of bystanders ignoring a murder seems an unlikely topic for a single, but that’s the story that Jet Stream’s “All’s Quiet on West 23rd” tells:

Mrs. Applebee pulled down the shade
And retired to her cozy bedPeter Dennings crossed the street,Turned his back and just a-shook his head.
Officer Warner, ’round the corner
Sippin’ coffee and a-makin’ time
He never heard the sounds of violence
Emanating from the crime

Chorus:
All’s quiet on West 23rd
Nobody saw, nobody heard

April Stark was in the parkConducting business from her usual spotShe was witness to what happenedBut conveniently forgotMonty Wheeler, he’s no squealerHe flipped his quarter high into the airHe saw their faces, but told detectives,“I don’t know nothing, Jack, nor do I care”

Evidently inspired by the 1964 murder in New York City of Kitty Genovese, “All’s Quiet on West 23rd” was the work of Joey Levine, who would make happier tunes in the next few years with the Ohio Express (“Yummy Yummy Yummy”), the 1910 Fruitgum Co.(“Simon Says”), the Kasenetz-Katz Singing Orchestral Circus (“Quick Joey Small [Run Joey Run]”) and Reunion (“Life Is A Rock But The Radio Rolled Me”). As gloomy as the topic of the record is, I like the result. The spare production and echoing vocals are effective and reminiscent of the Buffalo Springfield. (I’ve seen some pieces on ’Net claim wrongly that the vocalist is Stephen Stills and that Jet Stream is the Buffalo Springfield recording incognito.) I’m not sure what Levine’s motivation was, but if he was trying to bring attention to the phenomenon of urban indifference, he failed: The record, which was at No. 114 on June 17, 1967, peaked at No. 101.

Whether the record was good or bad, there was no way I could ignore a record by a group calling itself The Lamp of Childhood. As it turned out, “No More Running Around” is pretty good. Sitting at No. 116 in the middle of June, the record was the work of a group organized by musician and songwriter James Hendricks (his songwriting credits include, among many others, the Johnny Rivers’ hit “Summer Rain”), who was – according to the group’s history at Garagehangover – married to Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. But having a good record wasn’t enough. The single, the last of several released by the band, went no higher.

When looking at a chart from the fabled Summer of Love, a record titled “Groovy Summertime” just begs to be heard. The record, by a studio group called the Love Generation, was sitting at No. 120 and as these things go, is not bad. A little exploitive of pop culture, a little lightweight, but fun. Oddly enough, “Groovy Summertime” did the best on the chart of the six records examined here: It got to No. 74.

Earlier in 1967, the Casinos had reached No. 6 with “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye,” a classic pop-styled tune (with undertones of doo-wop) that was entirely out of step with the tie-dyed hippie anthems and garage rock growls of the time. (The organ is sweet, though.) A follow-up, “It’s All Over Now,” went only to No. 65, and during mid-June, another follow-up was about to fail, as “How Long Has It Been” came into the chart at No. 121 and was gone a week later. And that’s too bad, as the record plays better to me than the group’s hit, with a tougher, almost Stax-like sound. (And listen once more to the organ in the background!)

Maybe the best of the six records I found digging around for the post was the lowest ranked in that chart of June 17, 1967. “Some Kind Of Wonderful” by the delightfully named Soul Brothers Six was at No. 125. The song is more familiar, no doubt, from the 1975 cover version by Grand Funk, which went to No. 3. But if I had to choose, I’d go with the original, which only got to No. 91:

3 Responses to “Chart Digging: June 17, 1967”

Thanks for the chart digging, whiteray, but I just gotta go with several picks from from the top 10. “Groovin'”, “Somebody to Love” and “Windy” all bring back fond memories. And as for Aretha’s cover of “Respect”, that’s simply on of the great R&B crossover performances I’ve ever heard. Picturing my ex-wife dance to that song just brings a smile to my heart. Talk about TCB, that Chicago gal could dance like Chuck Berry plays a guitar.

I don’t ever remember encountering a Tempo store, but there was a Gamble’s in downtown Hopkins, not far from the Red Owl HQ, which was directly across Excelsior Boulevard from the HQ of its direct competitor, SuperValu.

Red Owl played a big role in my initial interest in radio. The company started a broadcasting subsidiary, Radio Suburbia, Incorporated, whose initials constituted the call letters of their first station, KRSI/950. It was the only reliable catch on my Remco Tiny Tim crystal set, and I’d dutifully listen up through “The Lord’s Prayer” at sunset sign-off.

There were changes in the ensuing years: the AM went fulltime, a sister FM signed on and by 1969, the radio division’s changed to Areawide Communications Corporation with the Gamble-Skogmo acquisition. The party ended when the FCC ordered the sale of KRSI AM-FM, WNAX/Yankton and WEBC/Duluth due to antitrust proceedings. Apparently, time buys on the corporate stations equalled more favorable shelf placement in the Red Owl stores.

It’s only fitting that the original KRSI studio/office site in St. Louis Park is now the home of a Trader Joe’s store.

[…] actually the Buffalo Springfield, but it isn’t. “All’s Quiet on West 23rd,” according to our pal whiteray at Echoes in the Wind, features bubblegum king Joey Levine on lead vocals (a guy who does not sound like Stephen Stills […]